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ARAS Connections Issue 3, 2018
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Amelia: Images of Mystery
The Transformation of Shadow in Women
Joan Golden-Alexis
ARAS Connections Issue 3, 2018
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Then I learned that he who fights against the night must move its deepest
darkness so that it gives out its light—Walter Benjamin
Introduction
During my years as a clinician, I have always held shadow—that point of
darkness—as the place to begin my inquiry, and the place to begin drawing my
patients and myself into a wider consciousness. It is shadow, where I look to have
my questions, not answered, but constantly refined. In these queries I have
noticed a difference in the way shadow, one’s dark shadow as well as one’s bright
shadow—one’s unlived life potential—is expressed in women and in men. There
are differences in the kinds of images presented, the arc of the transformation in
these images over time, and particularly the narrative, the discourse that each
gender conveys. The narratives of women have particularly captured my interest,
and are the focus of this exploration.
Amelia’s Journey Through Shadow
In this exploration, I will be looking into the work of the Cuban artist,
Amelia Peláez (1896-1968). Amelia has produced a series of paintings that give us
an intimate view into her journey through shadow towards an authentic
expression of Self. Her imagery is interesting in that it displays movement from a
powerful psychic ground that is internal, closed off and incubating to one that
unfolds with uncommon strength and velocity. Following her imagery, I will
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attempt to bring forth the compelling value and meaning of her work in making
shadow in women more accessible to our understanding.
Her paintings will be presented in chronological order, enabling them to
describe the trajectory of her imagery. The discussion is divided into four parts:
The Introduction of the Vessel; the Re-introduction of the Human Element; and
the Impact of Volumetric Space on the artist’s work. I will conclude with a short
discussion of how these images may impact, and inform the theory of women’s
journey of integration.
Amelia Peláez
The creativity and vibrancy of Amelia’s internal and private world is
defined by her connection to the Spanish-Cuban upper-class culture into which
she was born. This is a culture where women never leave their homes,
unaccompanied, and their lives are circumscribed by the decorative iron work
that completely covers windows, doors, and balconies, and defines the outer
boundaries of their daily existence.
In response, and to keep her inner life alive, Amelia worked every day,
creating paintings, and later, painting ceramics. Amelia, a woman of few words,
made only one known recorded public statement. With it, she makes an open
declaration of her need to employ her art to connect with, and help her to
understand her inner life, and through the art, itself, to communicate to others
her understanding. She says, “I am not interested in copying the object…What
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matters is the relationship of the motif with oneself,” with one’s personality, and
the power the artist has “to organize his emotions.” (Blanc, G.V. p.31)
Viewing Amelia’s art as a place of entrance into her psychic process grew from
this statement. This is her only public statement about her work, and her only public
attempt offered to help us understand her passion. Through it, Amelia makes it clear
that her persistence and her discipline towards her work, has at its heart, a belief in art’s
power to provide both an “understanding” and “organization” of her “emotions.” It is
through her consistent work with images that she hopes to understand her internal life
and its emerging processes. It is out of a respect for Amelia’s own perspective on her
work that I have applied a Jungian lens, and my own imaginative reflections to her
work. I offer it in hopes that it might give us, insight into the emergent individuation
processes within Amelia, and potentially to those within other women as well.
It is not surprising that Amelia’s art begins with a meticulous exploration
of the world inside the home, the world where a Cuban woman of that time could
live unselfconsciously—and ends with the exploration of the transformational
process in women, both inside and in relationship to the collective norms.
From her work, we see how she comes to know herself as deeply
embedded, and finally differentiated from the quotidian objects that animate her
world. She both loses herself in, and sorts herself out from each of the tiniest
authentic fragments of her everyday life—the stained-glass windows, the
columns, the lacework of the iron grilles, and tablecloths. They are all made
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grand, all placed in contact with the organic luxury of tropical fruits and flowers,
and often confabulated with the handmade works of the artisan.
As Amelia attempts to render these objects in paint or ceramic, we see her
at first ensnared, and willingly or unwillingly drawn into the web of these objects.
She is often only semi-defined, semi-separate. We see her process of
differentiation in action, as her developing process of discernment enters her
vision, and she slowly defines the internal and outward limits of her being.
Her work demonstrates how the shadowed parts of her nature gradually
emerge from within her unconscious psyche, and become embodied in her work,
and in her life. Organizing her work chronologically, we have a unique view into
this emergent process within one woman, a woman who dwells deeply,
luxuriously and sensuously inside the generativity of women, and attempts to
explore it.
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Amelia Paláez—the Texture of her Life
Figure 1 Self Portrait, 1946 Peláez, Oil on Canvas
Shown here, is Amelia’s only self-portrait. She is ensconced in her favorite
wicker chair, the outline of her body is not totally separate from the chair, her
hands, primitively drawn, are not well adapted for connecting or grasping. She
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has a single tear on her cheek below her eye, and the heart area of her body is
transparent and undefined.
Amelia was born in the second year of Cuba’s final liberation war against Spain
on January 5, 1896. Her family was part of the Cuban-Creole middle class and was well-
off both economically and socially. The house she occupied during her childhood
became her dwelling during her later years, and provided the inspiration for her art. The
house, with its towering white façade, its columns, wrought iron fences, ornate windows
and wicker furniture can be seen in the background of numerous of Amelia’s paintings.
Her favorite item, her wicker chair is pictured above in her self-portrait. In the backyard
of her house there was a pavilion surrounded by numerous exotic plants and birds. This
became the inspiring natural setting for all her paintings, Amelia’s primary workshop,
and the outer boundaries of her daily world.
Although Amelia was a liberated woman, far ahead of her time, an inspiration to
her contemporaries, and considered one of the most talented and inventive female
Cuban artists, Amelia was only liberated, courageous, and outspoken in connection to
her art. At heart, and at home, she remained unchanged by her experiences and her
travels. Cloistered in her house and garden, she appeared to others as remote, shy,
retiring, and extremely soft spoken. Desiring to remain undisturbed in her work, it is
said that she exaggerated her hearing loss, forcing her mother and more extraverted
sisters to deal with the sale of her paintings, and all dealings with people less personally
known to her. (Blanc, G.V. p. 60)
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Her friend, and fellow artist, visiting her in Paris during her almost six years of
studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre and Fernand Léger’s Académie
Moderne, and later in New York during her studies at the Art Students League,
described her profound impact on him. Amelia appeared to him “wrapped always in an
atmosphere of silence and of perfect solitude.” (Blanc, G.V. p. 31). The person most
intimately connected with Amelia during her studies, the Russian painter Alexandra
Exter, wrote of her that “She is completely in her painting; it is the only expression of
her profound inner life.” (Blanc, G.V. p. 33). Others have suggested that within the
confines of the safety of her home, family and small group of close friends, she was more
open, and accessible.
In the realm of art, and its relationship to the outside world, in the realm of
fighting for the worth of her art, and her worth in relationship to it, Amelia revealed an
entirely different side of her personality. Although she remained always a woman of few
words, her persistence in regard to securing a place for the art she believed in (Cuban
Modernism); her persistence in obtaining teaching positions customarily not open to
women in Cuba; her persistence in her fight not to be overlooked as a woman artist; her
persistence in regard to the many years she spent abroad studying; and finally her
unrelenting discipline with her work, reveal Amelia as an activist and powerful fighter
for the art to which she devoted her life.
She believed each artist had the right to paint in their own way. Most poignantly,
she did not believe that art should be controlled by politics or art theory, and her
signature was the first in a long list of distinguished Cuban artists who sent a statement
to the government and the press protesting the coming to Havana of a Latin American
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art exhibition sponsored by the Franco regime in Spain. (Blanc, G.V. p.57). As a judge in
the 1952 Venice Biennial, despite her “shyness” she was shockingly and aggressively
outspoken in addressing the fanaticism of the revolutionary artists in their lack of regard
for Cuban non-revolutionary art and the abstractionists’ lack of regard for figurative
styles. (Blanc, G.V. pp.58-60)
While many of her fellow artists attempted to define the new autonomous Cuban
culture as its own entity, and were striving to define a “Cuban art form,” Amelia
maintained her own personal focus, developing her unique aesthetic of simplified forms
and bold colors. She focused on the secret world of women hidden inside the confines of
the Cuban house, out of sight of the powerful Cuban Machismo. Through her painting
we are offered a view into the inside world of the Cuban woman. We view languid female
forms, sensuous and mystical at the same time, flowers, birds, all the domestic items
inside the house, all heavy with dreams, a feminine world finally brought out into the
light.
Amelia, always tenaciousness with regard to gaining respect for her work as a
Cuban female artist, both at home and abroad, she participated in numerous group
exhibitions, and important one-woman exhibitions. She was, by the end of the 1950’s,
probably the most respected artist living in Cuba, and together with Wilfredo Lam, the
most respected Cuban artist internationally.
Besides the painting and pottery discussed below, Amelia dedicated much time to
murals created for public buildings in Cuba, her most famous one is the façade of the
Habana Hilton Hotel. She also participated in the renowned 1943 exhibition at the
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Museum of Modern Art in New York, and her work was later featured in The Cuban
Museum of Art and Culture in Miami in 1988, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami in
2013. Since her death respect for her work continues to mount and there have been
many exhibitions in Miami and Havana as new aspects of her work are understood.
Presently there are important examples of her work in the collections of the Museum of
Modern Art in New York and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C.
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First Series: The Introduction of the Vessel
The Introduction of the Vessel
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Figure 2 Seated Woman, 1929, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In 1929 Amelia paints Seated Woman, a painting in which the woman
herself has become the vessel of her own transformation; her body assumes a
powerful enclosed column resting on her feet rotated inward forming the vessel’s
stabilizing base.
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Haunting, in its enigmatic silence, and in its depth of concentration and
calm containment, Seated Woman possesses the enormous force and power of an
incubation, which precludes connection to the environment, or movement in the
world. She has no arms to hold, no hands to form things, no limbs to travel.
Figure 3 Ferns, 1933, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
With Ferns, (1933), painted three years later, it appears that moving from
the realm of the human subject, where the figure was constricted and isolated, to
the world of objects found in the interior of the home, the world of vessels, allows
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Amelia, a place of more comfort, safety and freedom of expression, and she
displays it here with unbounded intensity. Expressing both integration with
internal processes and with the environment, the vessel reverberates, and the
environment resonates with the enormous swish upward, and outward of green,
moist and verdant energy. The incised mandalic structure around the vibrating
vessel suggests both the power of its energetic emanations, and sense of a holding
surround.
Figure 4 Still Life with Fruit, 1935, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In Still Life with Fruit, (1935) Amelia continues working in the non-
human world of objects and of vessels, and she continues the compositional
theme she began in Ferns, which features a vessel as its central element. The
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vessel appears to symbolize a safe and private space; a font, where emerging
aspects of the creative unconscious can be accessed. The fruits of the womb are
green and lush and take center stage again, yet they are not organic but rather
give the appearance of richly textured fabric, part and parcel of the decorative
aspect of the home environment. The fabric fruits rest in a vessel on a tablecloth,
which takes on the look of another vessel. This gives the impression of a vessel
within a vessel, similar to the apparatus pictured by the alchemists in their
attempt to distill generative aspects of the personality.
Figure 5 Hibiscus, 1936, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In Hibiscus (1936) the central vessel produces an organic form, the fragile
Hibiscus. The Hibiscus is a flower that needs perfect conditions to bloom. Its
successful birth in this context suggests the framing question, “What are the
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perfect conditions that allow for this distinctly feminine, flower to survive?” The
font here is composed of an organic environment, which contains large
voluptuous leaves, encircled by a surrounding form that gives the appearance of
enclosing arms, which is another kind of holding vessel.
The red color here calls up intensity of feeling, both vitalizing, and
indirectly intensely sexual. Amelia’s imagery has moved us a step closer to human
life.
Figure 6 Still Life in Red, 1938. Peláez, Oil on Canvas
Again, in Still Life in Red, (1938) the new birth contains even more red,
layers and manifolds of red. In this case the enfolding environment is not an
actual womb but is instead a lush red tablecloth that mimics the wombs gaping
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openness at the moment of birth. The red color, here, calls up intensity of feeling,
both frightening and vitalizing. Amelia’s imagery has moved us another step
closer to human life, the human body, and human sensuality. The fruit appear
organic, although not completely differentiated from the non-organic birthing
vessel.
Figure 7 Cashews, 1939-40, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In Cashews (1939-40) the birthing vessel doubles as a protective
receptacle for the newly born, organic little manikins, “little people” that are
displayed in various stages of ripeness in their ongoing process of development.
Cashews are originally a seed that requires a long and complicated harvest
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containing many successive operations to obtain the cashew from its originating
seed. The “little cashews people” appear to symbolize the successive stages that
have to be undergone to become what they have it in them to become. In this
case, it seems they have it in them to become human.
Second Series: The Reintroduction of the Human
The Reintroduction of the Human
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Figure 8 The Balcony, 1942, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
The Balcony, (1942) depicts two women standing at a balcony. In this
painting, the women seem less defined, and less intimately known than the
environment. The vibrancy of the grill work, the gorgeous blue stained glass
window, the organic life of the foliage, the still life and the bird, all explode into
the limelight and seem to be deeply a part of the artist’s known and lived
experience.
The women, however, appear to be less known. They appear characterized
as “one more element in a composition in which the different parallel planes of
balcony, women, still life and fanlight are flattened into one.” (Blanc, p. 43) This
depiction of the human element in relation to the environment brings forth the
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important question of what is more and what is less known by the artist. It
appears as if her internal experience as human, and as woman, is less clearly, less
sensuously and emotionally known by her, than her environment.
Figure 9 The Sisters, 1943, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In, The Sisters, (1943), the grill work has taken the form of a heavy black
almost organic line, outlining the two women, and fusing them to each other, and
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to the balcony. However, the women, depicted here, although stilled, perhaps
frozen in place by the power of the environment, are shown as more defined,
more individual. They show more feeling in relationship to their predicament,
than the women portrayed in The Balcony.
Figure 10 Two Sisters Reading, 1944, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In the Two Sisters Reading, (1944), the internal process of differentiation
is made explicit. The two women are shown at the very beginning of the process
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of becoming. As the process of differentiation unfolds, we see that the two sisters
are actually one sister becoming two, a Siamese, one woman with two heads, each
with a face, mask-like and similar. They are seated in a chair with no depth, and
reading from the same book.
The internal and external dimensions of these women are not completely
differentiated from the environment. The two sisters are shown here at the
beginning of the sensory experience of owning their bodies. Their breasts are not
yet experienced as part of them, but rather seem to be part of the cover of the
book they are reading, and the book itself seems to become part of their body. In
the midst of this process, a developing hand emerges and seems to be holding,
perhaps “claiming” a form, very much resembling a breast, marking the emerging
feminine spirit taking bodily form.
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Figure 11 Two Sisters, 1946, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In the Two Sisters, (1946) the same process continues. The two sisters are
again painted as an aspect of the decorative environment, and again they are
actually one woman with two heads, the one has become two again. In this
iteration, however, each figure has its own individual face and set of different
intense feelings.
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The separate parts of this emerging woman appear to be more clearly
defined and have been taken further, than in the previous painting. The figures
have gained in both differentiation and connection; they are posed as more alive,
close, and with the ability to relate to and influence each other in an intimate and
feeling way. Each, appear to have their own set of feelings about their
immobilization. They are in fact, portrayed as attempting to make music
together, the “music” is somewhat impeded by mechanical hands, that are not yet
in total possession of human feeling.
Figure 12 Woman with Fish, 1948, Peláez, Oil on Canvas
In Woman with Fish, (1948) the final painting of this series, the struggle
towards emergence continues. Here, the emergence is viewed not from the
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perspective of emergent and differentiating internal parts, but from the parallel
context of emergence and differentiation from the environmental context.
Amelia portrays this process in her work as an on-going shifting between
figure and ground. What unfolds is a gradual and continual emergence of the
figures from the ground of their comforting, containing and enveloping
environmental context. The woman pictured has a powerful face, but she has no
mouth—no words, to communicate, no means of taking in nurturance. She has
made it part of the way out of her fabric womb. She has hands that are doing
something; she has hands that are holding onto a fish that is not very fish-like, a
fish that is losing its form in the lace tablecloth.
Despite the power of the woman’s emerging force, she remains chained to
the environment by the same decorative lace from which she is emerging. This is
amplified by the outline of the woman’s nose actually becoming one with the
seam of the cloth on the wall behind her. We can see that in this painting, the
same struggle for emergence is repeated that was depicted in the emergence of
organic forms from the inorganic in the previous series.
In the ongoing trajectory of Amelia’s work described thus far, it is clear
that she shows herself powerfully expressive in relationship to the richness of the
objects that are part of the home environment, and to nature, particularly plants
and flowers. In this series, she expresses clearly that in relation to the human
element, her connectedness appears to lose tone. This entire series seem to
portray the struggle to maintain a relationship directly with the human world and
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with herself as distinct in relationship to the extraordinary power of her
environment. The environment here includes the powerful pull of the cultural
context.
In this series, Amelia gives us entrance to the intense and difficult process
involved in woman’s struggle to differentiate internally and simultaneously from
the environmental context. With this work, she opens the framing question, “Is
this a gender related issue?” Can this be an issue of the downside of Eros, the
downside of the capacity for connection, unity and linking? Can the innate and
natural capacity for connection enable a vulnerability to becoming subsumed by
what one embraces, and utilizes as a source of safety?
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Third series: The Impact of Volumetric Space on the Artist’s Work
The Impact of Volumetric Space
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Figure 13 Vase, 1950
As Amelia begins her painting of ceramic forms, the vessel which has
always been the heart of her work, and the vital fixed point in the center of her
paintings now takes a new form. It is now an actual volumetric object in physical
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space. Placing her hands daily on ceramic forms, and creating imaginative
paintings that are informed by the circle, and literally transformed by the heat of
the ceramic oven—often in unpredictable ways—brings a new potential to her
work. The vessels continue to depict an ongoing internal process of
transformation and metabolism of shadow, however when Amelia works in
volumetric space, not on the flat canvas, the intensity and velocity is heightened
in magical and powerful ways.
Here, two women are shown in a musical dance-like interaction; they
appear deeply connected, enchanted, engaged, and embracing each other. The
vase appears to vibrate, involving the whole environment, similar to the vase
(with the powerful ferns) described in the first series. Is one woman sitting on the
other’s lap? Here, internal differentiation seems to mirror the relational potential
for engagement.
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Figure 14 Bowl with Dancing Women, 1951
In Bowl with Dancing Women (1951), two women are located in an
intriguing otherworldly moonscape. The central focus is the women’s primitively
conceived hands shown as almost touching. Directly above the point where these
hands would touch, is a shining light, a light, which reverberates to and
announces that these two parts coming together are in the process of the creation
of a third. The sameness and yet slight difference between the two figures
underscore the potential to come together, fructify and create a new form within,
and with implication for a different mode of relational interaction in the world.
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Figure 15 Crowned Siamese, 1951
In Crowned Siamese (1951) an amazing form is pictured on a plate with a
heavy border around its edge, protecting the transformation pictured within; it is
a rebis caught in the midst of becoming. Within the heavy border there is a
crowned creature composed of breasts with eyes, an ambiguous and dominant
head conflated with a body, a little squat body with hands clasped at the bottom,
hands doubling as a vagina with a bow.
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This miraculous form seems to be a celebration of a newly crowned
principle in the on-going emergence of psyche, where on the one hand the
dominance of the sexual imagery is concomitant with something about having a
face within the world, having fingers that can clasp themselves, and most
importantly making two parts of something into a whole. The image appears to
represent a conjunction, a conjunction that is a “face” posed in tight conjunction
with a “breast,” a “vagina,” and being “female.” The conjunction—the ability to
hold these parts together—is both crowned and celebrated. Here, the clear
statement emerges that possession of one’s body and particularly one’s sexuality
is a necessary part of the emergence of a sense of self.
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Figure 16 Sketch for a Mural, 1951
In Sketch for a Mural, (1951) the image depicts the woman’s potential of
holding the opposites of identifying as both subject and object at the same time.
This initiates the beginning of her differentiation from the world of objects, and
her transition into the human world.
Pictured is a woman that is part table with her arms defining the outer
limits of the round table top; the vase of flowers is held between her two hands,
where it would be placed on the table, and her skirt doubles as the tablecloth
hanging over the edge of the table. She is also part woman and part Siamese, a
woman in the process of becoming two which is expressed in the emergence of
four legs, two arms and two heads placed back to back.
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Figure 17 Fish Women’s Fruit Bowl, 1952
In Fish Women’s Fruit Bowl (1952) three large women with fish heads and
circular eyes sport large laughing mouths, and at the same time a functioning and
useful arm and hand emerges grasping a fish that actually appears to be a fish. At
this point the women are shown as having developed the capacity to interact, use
their hands to grasp things in the environment, and most importantly their
mouths can be employed to take in nurturance, and as means of expression of
joyful interaction. For the first time, it seems, a smile makes its appearance.
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Figure 18 Fruit Bowl with Women and Fish, 1953
Fruit Bowl with Women and Fish, (1953) seems to have its own internal
wind, which causes the bowl to appear as if it is turning. A center of
consciousness appears here, and a central cross is formed, which defines four
separate quadrants. This appears to represent the beginning of the emergent
“Self,” a center that can pose a magnetic pull, the beginning of an opposition to
the power of the environment’s pull towards submergence. The vertical pull—the
internal dimension—is the strongest, although the horizontal—the movement out
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into the world—is also a very defined force defying submergence with the
environment.
The emergence of a center and the wind, the powerful movement of
psyche, follows closely upon the women’s development of “mouths” and hands
shown in the previous ceramic bowl; the mouth is designed for both taking in
(nurturance) and expression, (speech), and the hand is designed for connection
with the world in various ways.
The fish women possess a much more in-the-world arm and hand holding
the fish, and appear through their accentuated color and dominance to provide
the energy for the wind, the circular motion and the psychic movement forward.
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Figure 19 Dish with Birds, 1953
Dish with Birds, (1953) painted the same year also takes a mandalic form
in which the aerial element of the bird is introduced to the movement around a
center. Here, there are four winds (indicated by the four birds) each moving in a
different direction. These winds make a correction in emphasis to the powerful
vertical movement in the last plate. The winds make the shift towards the
horizontal and towards movement out into the world. The lack of a boundary
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around the outside of the plate may suggest there is a renewed security around
the outer, the relational. The addition of the three inner rings around the white
center appears to provide an inner sanctum of sufficient safety and strength
around a strong inner core.
Figure 20 In Women in Profile, 1953
In Women in Profile, (1953) Amelia again returns to the human element,
painting two women, one of whom appears to be a little manikin—a homunculus
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containing all the seeds of the future complete woman—something that is held
safely in the casing or vessel of the body. Although, there is a strong element of
these figures sinking into non-differentiation of the ground, there is also the
beginning of a new form, a beginning differentiation of figure and ground. These
figures are framed with space behind them, and yellow light, which dramatically
separates figure and ground and orchestrates the beginnings of something new, a
more individuated relationship with the environment.
Figure 21 Women, 1958
The next and last painting, Women (1958), is both alive and powerfully
infused with movement and an otherworldly light. It pictures a moment of both
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alarm and revelation. This heightened moment depicted as revelatory, appears to
signify a moment of penetration from another more sacred realm of knowing that
has transformed the internal experience of the women. The women appear
transfixed.
The women are depicted finally liberated from their environment, moving
toward twinship, celebrating their own dual nature and acceptance of their
uniqueness. Both figures are oriented in the same way, two internal aspects
depicting their resonance with one another. Logos comes in here for the first
time, coming from the collective unconscious and imaged in the Doric columns
and the solid and squared off quality of the frame. Here Logos seems to outline
and solidify the generative transformation that has occurred.
Conclusion
The journey through Amelia’s work takes one into the territory of the
unconscious, a place of secret gestations and transformations of which initially
there is no awareness, no inkling until they suddenly pass into the light. Her work
adds credence to an alchemical paradigm of transformation, and brings forth
important questions about shadow transformations and their contribution to the
movement towards wholeness in women.
Amelia’s images reveal an important aspect of the archetypal processes
involved in depicting the transformation of women towards a depth of connection
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with themselves and its concomitant separation from the environment. The
images reveal a slow movement toward identity, individuation, agency, a process
that appears to take place against the grain of something innate, against the
gravitational pull of all that offers comfort and safety and which supports a kind
of undifferentiated diffuseness of Self and other.
It is very interesting that the appearance of a sense of a center emerges
after the development of a psychological sense of “hands” that can interact with
the environment and “mouths” that open to nourishment from the environment,
and can express a point of view. It appears that this notion holds important
implications for clinical work with women. It is also important that Logos
appears to significantly inform the whole process in its continual opposition to
diffuseness and in its support of boundaries between organic and inorganic, self
and other, self and object.
In women, the capacity of the environment to offer such a powerful level of
comfort, safety and meaning appears to split the libido, pulling it away from the
woman, leaving her less intimately known to herself, and an unequal match to the
power that the environment and collective forms, seems to have over her. This
process may explain women’s reported porousness in relationship to the
environment, an environment, which possesses a felt safety, but also maintains a
powerful pull against the emergence of a sense of a center of self—and against a
strong sense of “I”, that is an “I” that can stand for itself, combating diffuseness
and maintaining a clear stance of reflection on herself and the ethos of which she
is a part.
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Amelia shows the painstaking differentiating process involved in
reclaiming the libido back into investment in the woman herself, and her ability
to utilize it to further identify a center of consciousness other than that defined by
the collective. This arduous and difficult process involving regressions to earlier
states may explain the vulnerability women have to losing a sense of who they
are, and their difficulty in attributing meaning, and value to themselves, and to
their own creative efforts.
Joan Golden-Alexis, PhD is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in New York City.
She is a training analyst, faculty member and supervisor at the Jungian Psychoanalytic
Association in New York and at the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. She is
a clinical supervisor at the Graduate School of Psychology of Yeshiva University. She is
former coordinator and supervisor of family and couple training at the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine and former coordinator of curriculum at the JPA. She writes and
lectures on dreams, and the development of symbolic consciousness, in psychoanalysis.
Her most recent published article is “Written in the Flesh—the transformational Magic
of the Tattoo"
drjoangolden@gmail.com
Bibliography:
Morales, R. and I. Elliot (2013) Amelia Peláez; The Craft of Modernity. Miami:
Perez Art Museum.
Jubrias, M.E. (2008) Amelia Peláez; Ceramica. Cuba: Fundacion Arte Cubano.
ARAS Connections Issue 3, 2018
This paper is strictly for educational use and is protected by United States copyright laws. Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties. 43
Blanc, G.V. (1988) Amelia Peláez 1896-1968; A Retrospective. Miami: Cuban
Museum of Art and Culture.
Image credits:
Figure 1: Self-Portrait, 1946, Peláez, Gouache and watercolor on paper (Morales
and Elliot, 85)
Figure 2: Seated Woman, 1929, Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Blanc, 74)
Figure 3: Ferns, 1933, Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Blanc, 76)
Figure 4: Still Life with Fruit, 1935. Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Morales and Elliot, 45)
Figure 5: Hibiscus, 1936, Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Morales and Elliot, 53)
Figure 6: Still Life in Red, 1938, Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Blanc, 79)
Figure 7: Cashews, 1939-1940, Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Blanc, 80)
Figure 8: Balcony, 1942, Peláez, Gouache on paper (Blanc, 81)
Figure 9: The Sisters, 1943, Peláez, Gouache on paper (Morales and Elliot, 69)
Figure 10: Two Sisters Reading, 1944, Peláez, Gouache on paper (Blanc, 82)
Figure 11: The Two Sisters, 1946, Peláez, Gouache on paper (Morales and Elliot,
87)
Figure 12: Woman with Fish, 1948, Peláez, Oil on Canvas (Morales and Elliot, 93)
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Figure 13: Vase, 1950, Peláez, Red clay body, height 9 7/8 in. (Jubrias, 33)
Figure 14: Bowl with Dancing Women, 1951, Peláez, Red clay body, diameter 9
in. (Jubrias, 43, 106
Figure 15: Crowned Siamese (1951), Peláez, Refractory Paste, diameter 8 5/8 in.
(Jubrias, 30)
Figure 16: Sketch for a Mural, (1951), Peláez, Gouache on paper, (Jubrias, 113)
Figure 17: Fish Women’s Fruit Bowl (1952), Peláez, Red Clay body, diameter 9 in.
(Jubrias, 53)
Figure 18: Fruit Bowl with Women and Fish, (1953), Peláez, Red clay body,
diameter 13 ¾ in. (Jubrias, 64)
Figure 19: Dish with Birds, (1953), Peláez, Red clay body, diameter 13 5/8,
(Jubrias, 65)
Figure 20: Women in Profile, (1953), Peláez, Oil on paper, (Jubrias, 100)
Figure 21: Two Women (1959), Peláez, Gouache on paper laid down on canvas
(Jubrias, 105)